HTML5 at work

I plan to look out for & compile interesting, practical, real-world examples of HTML5 features that popular websites have started implementing. I hope all the browser manufacturers quickly agree on a common minimum set of HTML5 features & get HTML5 rolling.

* Google Docs now supports uploading an entire folder.

There is a nice explanation on StackOverflow about how this is achieved  by setting up an attribute "webkitdirectory" on a file input element.

Unfortunately as this attribute is proprietary, this feature doesn't work on all browsers.

* The Windows Live team recently released a faster new version of SkyDrive that incorporates HTML5 features.

"We’re using HTML5 for CSS animations, reflow animations and other features. We’re using local storage for various parts of our caching support. We’ve also worked on making our HTML more standards compliant, so that everything you see works in as many modern browsers as possible."

HTML5 versions of Hotmail & Bing are believed to be on the cards

* 6 of the world's top 10 websites currently use LocalStorage on the mobile while Bing & Google use it on the desktop browser as well. Twitter uses App cache.

(to be continued....)

Read More

Discover public transport in India with Google Transit

I first tried Google Transit in Seattle in 2008 for help with bus routes and wished it came to India as well. I was happy when it started covering local trains of the Hyderabad Multi Modal Transit System (MMTS) in 2010(it seems to discontinued now) and then wished it worked with bus routes as well. Being a believer in public transport as a way to protect the environment, I was glad to find out that Google Transit provides help with bus routes in Hyderabad, Bangalore, Chennai, Mumbai, Delhi.

It'll be great if they also show the cost & distance involved in different bus routes and bus types (buses in Bangalore & Hyderabad have multiple types of services with varying ticket costs)

Read More

India - Know your elected government representatives

Who says India is a poor country? Did you know 315 of the 545 MPs (Members of Parliament) in the current Lok Sabha or Lower House of Parliament are crorepatis (have assets greater than 10 million Indian rupees)? Out of 543 MPs (Lok Sabha), 153 are facing criminal charges. Fifty-four are facing charges of very serious nature, including murder. Who says having 35 criminal cases filed against an individual can stop that person from becoming a law-maker?


The Association for Democratic Reforms' National Election Watch is a web-based application that has collated details about India's elected government representatives, both at the state & national level, from their own sworn affidavits. It lists details like their constituency, Party, involvement (if any) in criminal cases, education, assets and liabilities. Find out how the representative for your region stacks up against the rest and be better informed while voting at the next election.

This website is the winner of the 2011 NASSCOM Social Innovation Honours in the ICT led Innovation by Multi-stakeholder Partnerships category.

Also see:
BigTech/NASSCOM Foundation offers NGOs software titles at huge discounts
Indian software product start-ups that are making news
Judicial Orders that changed the nation 
When grassroots innovation goes global

Read More

Free WebApp Security Testing tools

Performance & Security are non-functional requirements which cannot be taken for granted.

Here's a compilation of Security testing tools for Web apps, drawn from an answer on the Pro WebMasters StackExchange forum & other sources -

• Netsparker Community Edition - detects SQL Injection, XSS & other vulnerabilities
• Watcher - Fiddler plugin that works as a passive-analysis tool
• Microsoft Web Protection Library (WPL)
• Web Application Configuration Analyzer (WACA) - analyzes server configuration for security best practices related to General Windows, IIS , ASP.NET and SQL Server settings.
• AntiXSS 4.0 - protects ASP.NET web-based applications from XSS attacks
• CAT.NET
• HP Scrawlr - scans for SQL injection vulnerabilities
• Exploit-Me - suite of Firefox add-ons
• Websecurify - also available as a Google Chrome Extension
• Acunetix Free Edition
• N-Stalker Free Edition
• Google's Skipfish
• RatProxy - passive web application security assessment tool
• Nikto2 - open source web server scanner
• w3af or Web Application Attack and Audit Framework
• Arachni
• Wapiti
• WebScarab

Also see:
Web Performance Analysis & Optimization tools

Read More

Comparison of URL Shortener services

SearchEngineLand & NotLong have compared popular URL Shortener services.

Google offers its own URL Shortener service called goo.gl (gl is the country-code top-level domain designated for Gibraltar). It now also has an API.

Pingdom, the uptime & performance monitoring service, has found goo.gl to be one of the fastest and with 100% uptime.

For spam, security or legal reasons, the goo.gl service can disable some short URLs

Read More

How Tynt Insight works

If you are looking for tips on a range of useful topics, head to Dummies.com (never mind the name). It is the website for the For Dummies series of plain English reference books. The site features interesting topics from it's books on varied & complex subjects.

If you copy & paste any content from there, it will add a link of the URL from where it was copied, at the end of the pasted content. This is achieved by a 12KB JavaScript utility library called Tynt Insight.

There is a nice explanation on StackOverflow about how Tynt Insight works -

• the code activates on events like mouseup, mousedown, and copy (in the startListeningForTraces function)
• if the user selected a range of text, then it:
  • creates the HTML for an attribution link, plus optional CC license URL
  • appends this HTML to the selection, placing it inside a zero-size <div> (to keep it invisible on-screen)
  • reports what was copied back to Tynt's servers

Read More

HOW TO make Gmail Labels act like Hotmail Folders

If you apply a Label to an email in Gmail, it will appear under both the Inbox & the Label category chosen. This is unlike in Hotmail where an email can appear only under one Folder category.

To address this issue, Gmail introduced a "Move to" option that will place an email under a single Label or category. This option can help in maintaining a clutter-free, cleaner Gmail Inbox but requires manual intervention. A poster on the StackExchange Web Apps forum wanted to know how he can automatically filter emails on arrival so that they are placed under a single category as in Hotmail.

Here are the steps -
1. Click on the "Create a Filter" link that's next to search box in Gmail

2. As we want the filter to act upon ALL emails that are recieved, set the To: textbox to your own email address & click on the "Next Step" button

3. Choose the first option to Skip the Inbox alongwith "Apply the label:" option to move an incoming email to a specific label/category. This way every mail that you get will be automatically categorized, thereby simulating Hotmail Folders.

If you want to view all your emails uncategorized at any point of time,  click on the "All Mail" option in the left menu

Read More

Hotmail tip - Move, Delete, Find emails originating from a specific sender with a single click

Did you know, a context menu will pop-up after two seconds if you place your mouse on any email within Hotmail

With just one click on the context menu, you can then ...

• reply to that email without explicitly opening it
• find all emails which have originated from the same email address as that of the selected email
• move all emails from the same sender to a specified folder
• delete all emails which have originated from the same email address at once

This a pretty neat & thoughtful shortcut!


If you right click on that email, it opens up a context menu that will let you perform operations on that email alone

Also see:
Hotmail lets you download attachments as a zip file
The One Click GMail Help Layer UI Pattern

Read More